


Grace

by mresundance



Series: The Grace Stories [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bisexual Male Character, Established Relationship, M/M, Rape Recovery, Sexual Assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-22
Updated: 2010-11-22
Packaged: 2017-10-13 08:05:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/135020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mresundance/pseuds/mresundance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Normal people do not experience grace, John thinks. Well, not ordinary people, like him. Not ex-army medical doctors with holes in their shoulders and bad legs and nightmares of war and a black haired girl.</em> John and his triggers.</p><p>Sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/135018">Wounds</a>.</p><p>This fic is about dealing with the aftermath of sexual assault. It is mentioned in memory and not graphically depicted, but might be triggering. There are also somewhat detailed discussions of murder in this portion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grace

‘That was cracking,’ Sherlock says, grin maniacal. The warm wind, gusting through congested Bishopsgate, whips Sherlock’s frenzied black hair.

‘I shouldn’t say things like that,’ John says. ‘I try to be nicer than you.’

Sherlock’s look is cutting, but he’s still smiling.

‘Anderson’s an idiot and deserved it.’ Sherlock chuckles. ‘His hair does look like a mangy cat that needs drowning. If I didn’t already love you, I would, just for that marvel of an insult.’

John’s heart squeezes. Sherlock’s not said that before. But he’s already dancing ahead, through the crowds. John holds onto his elbow, letting Sherlock’s familiar, mad vibrations hum through him. At one point, John’s grip on his elbow hardens and he reels Sherlock in.

‘Oi, come here,’ he says and kisses him in the middle of the street, in the middle of the crowds. The tip of Sherlock’s ears actually flush pink. John stops hearing the dozen different languages streaming through the air, stops noticing people zigzagging around them. He smells Sherlock’s slightly sweet aftershave, the sheering chemicals on his clothes. Then a wave of lilac which is not Sherlock at all. John’s skin tightens. Every noise becomes blistering and every time someone jostles them, it’s like being grazed by barbed wire. He’s sweating, but not shaking. Every part of him has gone completely still and lifeless, except for the nauseous center in his own mind, where memory holds him captive.

He’s fifteen again, drowning in the smell of lilac perfume. She’d made a habit of sneaking into her mother’s room and daubing the perfume on. It made her feel sophisticated, wearing a woman’s perfume. She’d told him, that night in the tool-shed. He’d told her she smelled gorgeous and she’d smiled. It was like moonlight parting darkness; he’d been so sure he was in love.

‘Here,’ she said, handing him a bottle of wine. Even in the light of the torch, the bottle was dark and felt heavy.

‘I don’t want to,’ squirmy in his stomach. He’d told himself that it was because he was nervous about being around a girl he fancied.

‘Oh come on,’ she smirked. ‘Don’t be such a child.’

But I was, the man John is now protests. I was.

So he’d taken a mouthful – bitter as vinegar – and then another. And more, until the world warped around him. An hour later, he felt numb and cut off from himself as she undid his fly.

Now, in the present, Sherlock says, ‘John.’ Sherlock actually looks worried.

John holds onto Sherlock, clutching him like a survivor after a wreck might grapple for driftwood, though the wreck was twenty four years ago.

‘Just – take me home,’ he says.

Sherlock’s lips become a thin line. He nods and puts his arm around John’s shoulders.

By the time they reach 221b and Sherlock actually pays the cab driver himself – remarkable – John thinks hazily as he clomps up each step home – it’s mostly done by then. The panic and the nausea have ebbed. John just feels as if he’s been scraped out and emptied.

Still, Sherlock frets over him, wrapping him in the orange blanket he’d filched the night of their first kiss, when John shot the cabby. That was nearly seven months ago. In that time John’s found his nightmares of war subsiding and he’s only stumbled across her twice. He’d been doing good, really good, he thinks.

Sherlock asks him, again, if he’s alright. John shrugs off the blanket.

‘I’m fine.’

‘Do you want tea?’ Sherlock insists. ‘You want tea, don’t you? Everyone likes tea. It’s comforting.’

‘I don’t want tea,’ John says, feeling exhausted and aching. ‘Sit down and stop pacing. You’ll give me a headache.’

Sherlock huffs and sits down next to John, disrupting the cushions and making John bounce. They sit in silence for awhile. Sherlock fidgets

‘It was the lilac perfume on that one woman, wasn’t it? It triggered you.’

‘Yeah,’ John says quietly. He’d told Sherlock about that, of course, told him everything. He was the only person John had told everything to about that night.

Sherlock breathes heavily through his nose, making John think of a bull. An angry one, pawing the earth before charging. John sighs and puts his head in Sherlock’s lap. Sherlock strokes his hair.

‘Do you want to hear a joke?’

‘No. Your jokes are inappropriate.’

Sherlock snorts again, this time exasperated. ‘They are not.’

‘Sherlock, please shut up.’

John enjoys the silence and Sherlock stroking his hair, the nape of his neck. Each of his ears. His other hand slips under the hem of John’s top, grazing his ticklish ribs. John feels laughter quivering inside himself.

‘Stop that,’ he says.

‘If I do not hear you laugh tonight,’ Sherlock keeps running his fingers over John’s ribs. ‘The world will end.’

He manages to sound like there will be an actual apocalypse, which makes John want to laugh even more.

‘It will not.’

‘Oh, it will.’

‘Fuck off,’ John laughs.

Sherlock stops tickling him, but doesn’t stop stroking the nape of his neck. John rolls into the touch.

‘Are you hungry?’ Sherlock asks.

‘No.’ John turns so he can look up at Sherlock. He holds the next words, low and husky, in the back of this throat. ‘But I do like this.’

‘Do you?’ Sherlock’s mouth twitches wryly.

‘Yes,’ John says.

*

  
He lets Sherlock take the reins. John usually dislikes being submissive; it means ceding too much control for him, a kind of vulnerability which makes him feel exposed and helpless. But he trusts Sherlock, yes, as he digs his fingers into Sherlock’s pale neck and shoulder. He needs to feel full of something that is not this emptiness and weariness. He wants Sherlock to fill him up, with kisses and caresses, with his adoring gazes.

‘Take me to your bed,’ John whispers at one point. The sofa is fine, though awkward, and there are many good memories here from the last seven months. But he wants to smell Sherlock all around him, feel muffled in it, protected.

In Sherlock’s bed – which smells all of Sherlock and nothing else – Sherlock resumes filling John up with kisses and touches. His hands are so gentle, like an artist carefully shaping clay on the wheel. Then literally, he begins filling John with one, then two, then three and four ivory fingers. John’s back forms half a circle and he makes a series of high noises which dash against the hideous wallpaper.

‘I’ve got you,’ Sherlock says, holding him with one arm.

John makes a noise that’s something like a whine. It says: please never stop making me feel desired. Please never stop touching me like I’m so handsome to you. Like I’m beautiful, even. That I taste like honey and milk and I am so blessed, so blessed, please don’t stop touching me like you want me and like I’ve not been tainted or ruined.

Sherlock pulls his fingers out. But then Sherlock’s wrapping John’s legs around his waist and pushing himself back inside and they kiss while Sherlock moves slowly, steadily.

Grace is the only word, outside of Sherlock’s name, that John can think of for the next several minutes. Over and over, the chorus of a hymn perhaps. A hymn where pleasure and – yes, love – jolts John’s spine. Radiant hymn, all the bad burned off for now.

It is not spiritual grace. John has not lost his faith altogether, but it has become very disused. It’s not just sex, either. They’ve had enough sex by now they’re starting to intimately understand each other’s bodies, their likes and dislikes, reactions. It’s more that John can trust Sherlock with every part of him. Can trust Sherlock when he says he wants sex with him, hours after being triggered in a crowded street. Trusts Sherlock not to think that’s weird, or wrong, or anything but what it is. Comfort, pleasure and a feeling like being home.

‘Fuck,’ John says very loudly into Sherlock’s shoulder and expects that Mrs. Hudson will be warning him about his language later.

Sherlock follows. As they catch their breath, the night deepens around them in bruising shades of purple and blue. Sherlock cleans them off, lazily, with John’s undershirt, then spoons John against his chest.

Normal people do not experience grace, John thinks. Well, not ordinary people, like him. Not ex-army medical doctors with holes in their shoulders and bad legs who have nightmares of war and a black haired girl.

As he drifts off he realizes he loves Sherlock too. He’s loved Sherlock since the night he shot the cabby.

*

  
In the morning she’s there again. Buttery sunlight fills the room and Sherlock stretches. What begins as sloppy kissing leaves a trail of wet down John’s throat and chest, across his stomach and past his navel. The memory seizes John as Sherlock has him in his mouth. All John can see is her dark hair instead of Sherlock’s, like a crude overlay. He feels as if he is going to tear into pieces.

‘Stop, Sherlock, please.’ He pushes Sherlock away and there is no other word for it except that it hurts. The expression on Sherlock’s face hurts.

John yanks on clothes. He can’t look at Sherlock right now, he just can’t. There is something wrong with him. Instead of having normal reactions to things, like other people, John has his reactions, his triggers. Sometimes he thinks he’s been re-wired. As if she’d cracked open his head and re-arranged things. The copper and gold wires of John’s brain circuitry, bent, burnt and twisted the wrong way round.

He slams the bathroom door and locks it, knowing Sherlock will shoulder it open or pick the lock if he feels like it. John doesn’t care. He huddles down on the cold linoleum, letting the dark stuff his eye sockets. Right now, he wants to remain untouched. He wants to be alone.

Sometimes he is jealous of artifacts in museums. They are locked away in glass cases. Some of those cases are airtight. John thinks of the rare pottery and jewelry, the weapons and clay tablets, the delicate papyrus and human bones in the British Museum. Right now John hates all those beautiful, rare things, sealed and protected from the outside world. He wants to be rare enough, beautiful enough to be worth preserving. To be so priceless that he is allowed to remain untouched. He doesn’t want to be what he is now, which is untouchable. There is a difference.

Sherlock knocks on the door.

John doesn’t answer. He hears a low thud and a drag, like Sherlock has pressed his forehead to the door and leans there, waiting.

*

  
Coils of apple-skin litter the kitchen table as John comes in. It’s been a few days since the bathroom. He’d stayed there until the afternoon, forced out because he was hungry. He’d refused to talk about it with Sherlock. The last days have been permeated with the frost of that silence.

Sherlock pauses in the middle of skinning a granny smith and glances at John. There are two other apples, naked and pale on the table.

‘Morning,’ John mumbles.

‘Measuring the relative oxidation rates of different apples,’ Sherlock explains.

‘Oh.’

Sherlock keeps skinning, blade silver bright. John puts the kettle on.

He’s sitting across from Sherlock and buttering his toast when Sherlock says: ‘I still like to think of murdering him sometimes.’

John looks up. Sherlock’s on a gala apple now. The marbled red and yellow skin peels off in an efficient curl.

‘Who?’

The skin drops, severed from the fruit, and the blade swings free. Sherlock presses the pad of his thumb against the blade, as if testing.

‘Matt. After he assaulted me, I devised a number of ways I could murder him. It made me feel better sometimes.’

He selected a pink lady and began skinning.

‘For instance, poison seemed likely for awhile. Especially,’ he flicked the blade, ‘if it was painful and I could observe. But after a time, I mostly settled for – stabbing. Repeatedly. Even though it could easily be connected to me. Stabbing often indicates some kind of intimacy between the victim and the assailant.’ Sherlock says the last word with relish. ‘But I wanted to cut him open. To see what was inside him that would make him hurt me so much.’

He put the skinned pink lady down on the table.

‘How about you?’ Sherlock says, running the tip of the knife over his lower lip. ‘How would you murder her, if given the chance? If you would never be caught?’

John realizes his throat is dry when he tries to swallow. His heart hammers like gunfire.

‘I – I don’t know. I never thought about it,’ John lies.

‘Come on, use your imagination.’

‘I.’ John licks his lips. ‘I guess I would. Strangle her,’ he says slowly. Saying something, aloud, which had been in his private fantasies for years, is terrifying and exhilarating. ‘I would – yes – strangle her.’

‘With a cord?’

‘My hands,’ John answers immediately.

Sherlock smiles.

‘Oh yes.’

‘And,’ John says, aware of Sherlock’s ravenous eyes on him. ‘I would like to put a bag over her head. So I wouldn’t have to see her face.’

‘Mm.’ Still holding the blade, Sherlock steeples his fingers. ‘She’ll die faster then. Probably of asphyxiation.’

John shrugs. ‘Doesn’t matter if she’s dead.’

‘You could hold her down and I could it for you. You could watch.’ Sherlock’s eyes blazed as brightly as the blade and John is uncomfortably aware that they are two men talking about overpowering and murdering a woman. But then, John had been fifteen, weaker, more vulnerable than her, when she’d done something similar to him.

An ex girlfriend of John’s had demanded: ‘Why didn’t you just fight her?’ Her whole manner to John had changed after he told her. As if admitting that a woman could overpower him, emotionally, physically, had somehow made him half of a man.

John clears his throat and makes a fuss over noticing the kettle.

Sherlock selects another apple – a honeycrisp – and resumes slicing.

‘Tell me her name.’

John nearly drops his tea mug.

‘What?’

‘You heard me.’

‘I am not telling you her name Sherlock,’ John says, angry now. It had been – really wonderful – to think of killing her. It had; John can be honest about that. It had been a relief, in fact. But this is one step too far for him.

‘Tell me her name.’

‘No.’

‘I can find out.’

‘Don’t.’

‘Why not? Why won’t you tell me?’ Sherlock demands, sounding almost petulant, hurt.

‘I am not telling you. I’m afraid you’ll kill her. You can’t just kill people who hurt me,’ John’s voice tremors.

‘Tell me her name.’

‘I will not. I won’t, I won’t.’ John feels tears in his eyes. ‘Stop asking me to tell you her name, because I won’t.’ He covers his face in his hands and sobs. As Sherlock embraces his friend, John struggles against him.

‘No, I won’t,’ he gasps. ‘I won’t.’

‘Tell me.’ Sherlock is begging. ‘I won’t hurt her. Just tell me.’

‘Jenny,’ John says at last. ‘Her name was Jenny. Jenny Moran.’

Sherlock might have cut into John with his knife and dug Jenny out, as if she were shrapnel. It feels the same as having shrapnel pulled out of him. Painful, yes. But it means that something foreign and damaging, which shouldn’t be inside John, isn’t anymore.

Sherlock simply holds him for awhile, soothing his palms over John’s back. Eventually, reluctantly, they separate, and Sherlock notices his browning apples and John his cold toast.

A quarter of an hour later, Sherlock’s mobile bleeps with a text.

‘Brilliant. Lestrade says there’s been a triple murder,’ Sherlock says, voice and body electric. ‘You coming?’

A triple murder with Sherlock seems better than sitting around the flat by himself feeling raw and alone.

‘I’ll get my coat,’ John says. As he does, he realizes he has never, in the twenty-four years separating him from boy he was, said Jenny’s name. Not to himself, not to anyone. By saying her name, he can put her away a little. He can confront her, at least, in his own mind. He can confront what Jenny had done. He can be honest with himself, too. And maybe, hopefully, he will be good again.

As he tumbles down the steps behind Sherlock he thinks he’s like a neglected artifact. Cracked and broken, maybe worth restoring, with love and with time. But not sealed away in an airtight case, to be seen and not touched. Life is not about being sealed away from the things that make us hurt and suffer, he knows. Sherlock hails a taxi. Life is about being touched. Allowing others to hold him, hoping they would handle him with care and not crack or drop him.

In the taxi on the way to the scene, John watches golden leaves tremble on the limbs of trees and feels brave. He turns to Sherlock and looks at him.

‘I love you too, you know,’ he says, feeling ashamed that he says it so late.

Sherlock’s smile smothers the shame altogether. He says simply, ‘Yes.’


End file.
